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Our Editorial and News Affiliates

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) is an online and grassroots non-profit 501(c)3 public interest organization campaigning for health, justice, and sustainability. The OCA deals with crucial issues of food safety, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering, children's health, corporate accountability, Fair Trade, environmental sustainability and other key topics. We are the only organization in the US focused exclusively on promoting the views and interests of the nation's estimated 50 million organic and socially responsible consumers.

The OCA represents over 850,000 members, subscribers and volunteers, including several thousand businesses in the natural foods and organic marketplace. Our US and international policy board is broadly representative of the organic, family farm, environmental, and public interest community.

From its chocolate factory in the French Alps, Stephane Bonnat's family has been nurturing ties with cocoa farmers around the world for over a century, and together they are now driving a green revolution.

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote on a sweeping overhaul of the federal food safety law — S. 510. The House food safety bill passed last year (HR 2749) included several measures that threaten small-scale organic producers, including a registration fee of $500 and blanket application of complicated monitoring and traceability standards - regardless of one's farm size.

There was a time in the South when planting kudzu was not viewed as botanical vandalism, but as a community-spirited gesture. The vine, imported from Asia, was intended to control erosion and provide forage for livestock.
Some things just don't work out.

Energy-efficient homes have significantly lower default and delinquency rates than typical homes, according to an internal analysis conducted for a major financial institution last year. Here's yet another reason why it makes no sense that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have effectively killed Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE), a financing tool that has helped make efficiency improvements affordable for thousands of American homeowners.

Kellogg is recalling as many as 28 million boxes of cereal because a chemical is leaching from the food packaging into the cereal. The Food and Drug Administration states the reason for the recall as "uncharacteristic off-flavor and smell coming from the liner in the package." Other sources call it a wax-like substance, and parents are being warned that it may cause diarrhea or vomiting, particularly in sensitive children.

From coast to coast, eco-concerned homeowners are ripping out their manicured, chemically-treated lawns and replacing them with organic food gardens, native flowers and sometimes, just rocks. "It's a growing endeavour. It gets bigger and bigger every year," said Steven Saffier, coordinator of the Audubon Society's At Home programme, which encourages people to let their lawns go wild to support birds and other wildlife.

Manufacturers have been adding the germ fighter triclosan to soaps, hand washes, and a range of other products for years. But here's a dirty little secret: Once it washes down the drain, that triclosan can spawn dioxins. Dioxins come in 75 different flavors, distinguished by how many chlorine atoms dangle from each and where those atoms have attached (their locations indicated by the numbers in the front part of a dioxin's name). The most toxic is 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or TCDD. Some related kin bearing four to eight chlorines are also toxic, just less so.

Experts send a mixed message to consumers when it comes to eating fish: it's good for your heart health but beware of the methylmercury. A new way of organizing and ranking the pollutant's levels in fish and shellfish may help consumers navigate this apparent contradiction, according to the study's author.

Syracuse, NY -- Children race out of their classrooms onto green, fluffy grass playing fields. They tumble and slide, roll around and laugh. Their pants turn green from grass stains. They rub their eyes and faces. They drop water bottles and snacks onto the lawn. The lush grass helps to protect their knees from scrapes and guards them against serious injury. But the grass also could make them sick, according to environmental advocates and numerous scientific studies.

Urgent warnings by government experts about the risks of routinely using powerful CT scans to screen patients for colon cancer were brushed aside by the Food and Drug Administration, according to agency documents and interviews with agency scientists.